Want: L'Intraduisible (Desire in Translation)

I will begin with the ‘failure of translation’. If one can speak at all of beginnings. Before even approaching the ‘failure of language.’ I have arrived, we have all arrived here – here – mid-conversation, as it were. As if it were … possible to pick up where others have left off, without being subsumed into what Catherine Clément describes so exhaustively as syncope, a moment of absence, of retreat, disappearance, removal, to a here, not here, there somewhere, unaccountable, but for which we are, must be, accountable, somehow, somewhere.

Here, then. What I call here shall be ‘the failure of translation’. A place, liminal, interstitial, abyssal – all of these – into which we fall, as one might fall in love, breakingly, or else fall apart, devastatingly, catching on the pieces of our own ruination, jaggedly, tearingly, seemingly (seamingly?). Fall away, imperceptibly. Still, the leurre of falling, is that the movement finds completion. It is not so at all; I have not found it to be so. Is it possible, here, in this moment of failure, of ‘the failure of translation’ (begun before even beginning), to evoke a fall without drawing into this space, a whole exegetical mess? I do hope so. I would like to find fall (find fault?) in a bodily way, with all the bruising this entails, the marking of the body, and the inscription of the fall in the body’s tissue. A downward movement that stops at the breath, that stops at nothing, carried into and by the breath, such that it, the fall, becomes indistinguishable from our own exhalation. We may find, in the end, which is of course neverending, that our failure, the place into which we fall, is the very thing that catches us. But we aren’t quite there yet.

In Writing and Madness, Shoshana Felman writes (in collaborative translation) : “If the ‘failure of translation’ between languages is in some sense radically irreducible, what is at stake in the passage from one language to another is less translation in itself than the translation of oneself – into the otherness of languages. To speak about madness is to speak about the difference between languages: to import into one language the strangeness of another; to unsettle the decisions language has prescribed to us to that, somewhere between languages, will emerge the freedom to speak.” (19)

It might be relevant, here, to cite the same passage from La folie et la chose littéraire, Felman again, en français: “Or, si le ‘défaut de traduction’ est entre les langues, quelque part, radicalement irréductible, il s’agit, en passant d’une langue à une autre, en franchissant la limite entre langues, non pas tant (et non pas simplement) de traduire, que de se traduire à l’altérité des langues. Parler de la folie, c’est parler de la différence entre langues : faire passer à travers une langue l’étrangeté d’une autre; chercher à ébranler, dans chaque langue, les décisions linguistiques qu’elle prescrit à notre parole, afin qu’émerge entre les langues, dans un lieu indécidable, la liberté de parler.” (18-19)

I will speak of madness. Speak of madness from a reserve of desire. Speak of impotence in this place underwritten by jouissance. We can’t all be hard all of the time, and desire, in this instance, may well be located, furtively, within the interstitial ‘failure’ of translation. The faille, the fault line, the rupture that is given form when with our bodies we disrupt the limits, not just of language, of languages, but of ourselves.

A curious fracture occurs in this passage – in at least two senses of passage, the textual and the transitional, and in all the senses granted to sense. Passage: The passage into the otherness of language. Moving backwards from failure of translation to le défaut de la traduction. The equivalence is wonderfully instructive : failure for défaut. Failure, which might otherwise translate into French, as échec, or faille, or manquement. Défaut, as defect, flaw, fault, shortcoming, and yes, failing, as it pertains to people. Failure is something one arrives at. With défaut, one is already there. And here we are now inside this ‘failure’ which I have offered as a substitution for place, as place itself, this place, which I have suggested be designated by here, a here that is of course unreachable because it is the place where we are and the place we have yet to arrive at.

There is the suggestion, in Felman’s phraseology, in this apprehension of passage, of the foundational. “Irreducible,” she writes. I would like to leave this foundationality alone for a moment and turn instead, to the dislocations – the syncopes perhaps – that occur concomittantly, to the body that moves into the otherness of language and to the languages into and from which it moves. How this encounter is by its very undertaking, fractured, and how this fracture, a violent, incontrovertible and desirable consequence of dislocation, of displacement, is determining for the expression of desire, of desire’s inexpressibility, in and outside of (‘the failure of’) translation. And how, as a result, desire, in translation, its reserve, is an expression scattered with the ashes of grief, suffused, abysally, with the unboundedness of mourning, drenched with that same madness, with that inexpressibility, caught in that aporia of feeling.

In translation, I stand at a threshold. The translation itself stands at a threshold. Its, my, our, position is liminal, always. Translation, from the Latin, translatus, for ‘carried across’. What we carry must be lifted and borne. What we carry risks further disintegration in the course of its passage. (Further because, before even we arrive at the threshold of the text, on a verge of translation, the process of decay is already begun. It precedes us and exceeds us). None of it remains intact. Not the text from which we borrow, not that which we maim. Nor the body, our own, and the many others, that fall to pieces as we come into contact with them.

Translation (fr): le fait de transporter (les restes, le corps d’une personne); the transportation (of remains, of the body of a person). This body which is no longer body, but impossibly suffused with love nonetheless, that comes apart in our hands, and leaves imperceptible stains at the points at which we touch. Body for bruise. We trade in dust.

To translate is to touch. And as I have indicated elsewhere, while it may very well be impossible to establish an ethics of translation outside of the act of questioning itself, we may approach an ethics of touch through the acknowledgement of the bodies with which we come into contact, and their fragility, ours as well. Even though and perhaps because what we touch we touch unwittingly. We may envisage an ethics of touch that is relational, that is one of encounter, that anticipates our own otherness in the other whom (or which) we approach, approaches us, with all of the bodily after-effects, the exchange of breath, of fluids, of affect and affectation, of affection and tumult, violation.

“Between you and it there is a reciprocity of giving: you say You to it and give yourself to it; it says You to you and gives itself to you. You cannot come to an understanding about it with others; you are lonely with it; but it teaches you to encounter others and to stand your ground in such encounters; and through the grace of its advents and the melancholy of its departures it leads you to that You in which the lines of relation, though parallel, intersect. It does not help you to survive; it only helps you to have intimations of eternity.” (Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. W. Kaufmann, 84).

We, body and text, are porous – disastrously, delightfully, maddenningly, seductively, murderously permeable. Buber’s ‘reciprocity of giving’ implies a ‘reciprocity of taking’. And it is here that we lose ourselves, risk losing ourselves. Because, away from what onanistic excitements might hover at the surface of this practice, conceivable as many different forms of seduction and fucking, of penetration and orgasm, within a phallocentric economy of translation which does not preclude every form of violation, are questions that undermine the safe veneer of performativity in which our time finds such dissociated comfort – that implicate the whole of the fractured, displaced, self. I am not suggesting here that translation as a practice of eroticism is not possible, nor even desirable, but that the consequences of such a gesture are, necessarily, embedded in the historical moment in which we articulate want, and in which desire, not limited to the realm of carnality, is cast from a vast expanse of sadness. Buber’s reciprocity of giving, two letters short of a reciprocity of grieving, envisions encounter as loss. In the apprehension of vastness, we are no closer to surviving (it does not help you to survive); simply, we come into contact with, we touch the thing that eludes us. We touch beside touching. We grieve beside grief. We mourn what is insurmountable. We desire with the knowledge that what we desire is lost to us, is loss itself.

“The intersection of the lines of relation” brings the body to one threshold that touches another. In crossing these lines, we transport ourselves into the space of the other. However artificial these boundaries – whose forms are most dramatically, most violently evident at the border crossings between countries (witness, for example, the consequences of Walter Benjamin’s attempt at passage into Spain in 1940; or the intransigeantly guarded gates into and out of Israel) – a translation occurs as the body moves over the line, carrying itself as a remnant to be reconstituted on the other, aleatory, side; the passage threatens always to dissolve what passes, in the form of time, of space, of body, each in contact with the other, and at times several bodies at once, in just as many directions.

Shoshana Felman makes a distinction between ‘translation in itself’ and the ‘translation of oneself’. There is an ethical imperative to the latter construction that is, or may be, absent from the former. ‘Translation in itself’ maintains a safe distance (but from what?), positions translation, as an activity undertaken away from the body, away from the translator, and this despite the many formulations of (in)fidelity that have been many times debated. The question of fidelity arguably removes translation from the public (political) sphere and ensconces the act safely in the boudoir where pages turn in domestic privacy, for one’s own pain and delectation. We kiss the text in quiet.

At times – often – it devours us. The ‘translation of oneself’ makes clear this risk, positioning the body squarely where it already is, which is to say, spacially, temporally, between. It stands, unrealised, in anticipation of itself, and in cognisant fear of its imminent dispersal.

The desire to translate, to translate oneself is a desire to come into being in another form, through a language that might be able to hold what eludes the translator, of text, of self (this, at any rate, is the ideal). But the wager is such that this gesture of encounter, whether with myself or with another, is predicated upon its dispersal – regardless of intent. In reaching for another possible utterance, a further articulation of itself, it not only anticipates its own death, but invites it. Desire, in translation, is wrought of loss, and what it hopes to restore, it consigns, unwittingly, to oblivion. The passage delineated by the trace, the transcription, a palimpsestic device, becomes one of devastation. In the passage of oneself from one language into another, in the expression of a desire for further and more, the space that opens, that offers itself as here, the failure, the faille, is poised between murder and suicide; there is no natural death to speak of. I translate myself. We translate ourselves. That is, we carry ourselves, the part of us that remains at the moment of crossing, into the space of the other. This transfer, by its etymology and its reluctant generosity – ‘what gives takes’ might be a reformulation of Buber’s text – engages our willingness to leave something (of ourselves) behind. It places trust in the other; it vindicates the line; and with each crossing, back and forth, with each pause somewhere, there, at the place between, we carry out gestures of mourning, we complete the action of giving with grieving. We acknowledge, in this instant, and in this place, our failure to make encounter complete. It is this fracture, this fragmentation, of ourselves, of translation, and of the text in our bruised and bruising hands, which undermines the expression of a desire (traditionally expressed romantically as a desire for completion or wholeness) indistinguishable from the loss from which it arises.

The ‘failure of translation” is also the ‘failure of language’, and it is here that desire finds furtive, fractured form. Formidably. Forbiddingly. In La Carte postale, Derrida writes : “Tu as raison, nous sommes sans doute plusieurs et je ne suis pas si seul que je le dis parfois quand la plainte m’en est arrachée ou que je m’évertue encore à te séduire.” (“You are right, we are several no doubt and I am not as alone as I sometimes claim to be when the cry is wrenched from me or I still strive to seduce you.”) The name, in this case, Jacques Derrida’s, in the form of a signature, a seduction, is multiplied and rent. And what accompanies this expression of desire, unlanguaged, isolated (in his claim to a feeling of aloneness) is a cry, that has no form other than the sound from which and into which it emerges, shattered, torn. It is through striving, through the attempt to make passage, to(ward) the other (the lover) that the cry supplants the articulation of desire which is not ever realised. Two movements occur concomittantly : striving and wrenching. One, striving, is a manifestation of the will; the other, wrenching, is exerted from outside, subjugating and imposed. It is perhaps not possible to envision one without the other, desire without enclosure, freedom without constraint, language without the cry. And not silence, as one might anticipate. Not silence, because silence is in language; the cry is possibly a gesture (impossible) away from language, from the strictures that bind the body to a form of expression of its own design and which proves itself, again and again, to be inadequate. Because of our presence in it? What we touch falls to ruin. There is ample evidence of this all around, in our trampled cities, in the fields we do and do not cultivate, in the disappearance of our oceans, in the wars that abound, in the voice that falters, over and again. And so it stands to reason that translation – and as such touch – is, if not equatable with failure, a harbinger of failure (of falling), of destruction, one of its possible manifestations. In the reach away, we find ourselves caught. Which brings me to one of Buber’s most powerful formulations, locating the bind in the torment of freedom itself: “And to gain freedom from the belief in unfreedom is to gain freedom.” (I and Thou, 107).

We are not so far from where we began, the place reaching toward what Felman calls the “freedom to speak.” “Somewhere between languages,” she writes “ will emerge the freedom to speak.” Even between languages, one is speaking in relation to language, in the “reciprocity of giving”, of grieving. Leaving one another behind.

How is it that location becomes so determining in this conversation? That the ‘failure of translation’ takes on the characteristics of place, of a bordered here or a there, to be arrived at or left, inhabited, traversed, remembered, relocated, or necessarily, impossibly restored. In other words not just temporally but spacially determined as well. In absentia, always, since we are always just outside of its reach or it ours, missing one another at the moment of exchange, into which we fall, blunderingly, deliberately, and bereft of ability, we are surrendered to the caprice of language’s deceit and our willing participation in it.

Another curious glissement or slippage occurs in the penultimate clause of the Felman passage on passage. What is carried into English as “somewhere between languages”, is inscribed, in French as “dans un lieu indécidable”. In an undecidable place. Between as it occurs, and eludes me in my own work, entre-genre and entre-langues – between genders, genres, between languages – is a fluid, fluctuant, indeterminate place, a place in movement, always, and as such unlocatable, but relational. Indécidable expresses a desire for foundation, a reach toward a kind of stability that is not available to us in language as elsewhere. Indécidable, a mathematical term, cannot be sumitted either to refutation nor to proofs. It goes further than between into absence. Indécidable is what cannot be touched nor inhabited, what eludes the rational, Cartesian, trappings that would fix it, once and for all. Felman locates madness somewhere else, “somewhere at that point of silence where it is no longer we who speak, but where, in our absence, we are spoken.” L’indécidable might be that absent space into which we fall, into which we disappear, in the abyss opened by the ‘failure of translation’ which is none other than loss, the only possible place from which we might begin to articulate, inarticulably, the desire that underwrites, in a language of its own, unavailable to us, the ways in which we touch, might touch.

However ironically, these dislocations, these strange temperaments and temptations, actually enable encounter; they enable the expression of desire, which traverses the body into the text, through innumerable interchangeable intersecting circuits that entangle one with other, such that in touching through text to the other, we touch, not just ourselves – onanistically, sometimes self-destructively – but the untouched untouchable part that awaits, seductively, undecidably. Untouchable, not because it is unrivalled or unbreakable, but because it remains out of our grasp. Undecidable, for the part of us that is not yet incarcerated in the systems of language, the systems of thought which bait us with constraint. So we are left reaching, and the ethics of our endeavour lies there. Poised, on a verge, replete with desire, and depleting.

In the turn toward the body – the distances installed between body and language – is an impossible gesture of retrieval. It is the admission, the admonition, the avowal of the body’s own muted dislocation.

The reserve of desire might be in a name, withheld : the one spoken, and the one swallowed, neither of which is consumed, neither of which is consummated. Because to say body is already to fix in language a manner for desire, a manner for touch, a manner for movement which is seized in a lingual space of compromise and capitulation.

“Tu rêves pour pouvoir dire son nom, mais dès que tu le dis, le nom explose dans ta gorge, les débris t’étouffent et tu te réveilles pour vomir.”1 (Cixous, Préparatifs de noces au delà de l’abîme, 16.)

The name may not only be unspeakable but undesirable, even as it holds that reserve of desire, in a soundless, other place. It may, in this case, be what the body rejects, in the form, here, of vomit and remains. It is what remains of us. It is what makes of us : remains. And in the body’s emergence from itself, the spill of what is otherwise contained, in the viscous pore / pour of language, languages, we translate. We re-form…ulate the body’s own plural text; we submit it to (its) disintegration, we want the thing that is unavailable to us, the thing that language does not hold; the part that is body, in and outside of text that multiplies, enfolds.

There is insufficient time to expose all of my terms, to contextualise their relationship to one another and the (mis)uses I have made of them. If what I have described is akin to wreckage and ill-disposed to salvage, it is no less imperative that it find formulation, even failed formulation, with the recognition of its failure. It is no less urgent to reach toward an expression of touch in translation, to locate touch inside translation, its failure, our faults. History demands it, but so do the ethics that govern our work and our responsibility to the present.

I would like to conclude with a brief return to Derrida, and desire. In his essay on Jankélévitch entitled Pardonner: L’impardonnable et l’imprescriptible, Derrida offers this among his conclusions: “il n’y a de pardon, s’il y en a, que de l’im-pardonnable.” He is speaking, in the wake of the Shoah, of Jankélévitch’s polemical refusal, after Auschwitz, to forgive. “Foregiveness, writes Jankelevitch, died in the death camps.” To which Derrida, through very meticulous argumentation, arrives at this ethical aporia : that true forgiveness consists in forgiving the unforgiveable; a point he further developed in other work. I do not wish to open a conversation on the unforgiveable necessarily, nor to make a simple graft of translatability onto Derrida’s formulation. I do, however, wish to draw out the implications of (un)translatability and to suggest that they bear a comparable ethical weight with the unresolvable question of forgiveness. To point to a poignant and likely problematic relationship between the unforgiveable and the untranslatable. Again and again, we say that despite the failure of translation, we must translate, that despite the many obstacles to and within translation, we must continue to cross these borders, whatever the risk, to the body of the text, to our own bodies. This must is governed by an ethical imperative that reaches toward the body of language. “The life of language,” Derrida insists “is also the work of mourning; it is also impossible mourning.” I cannot help but ask now, Where does translation die? I offer this in reply: it dies inside of us. We anticipate its death, we facilitate it, and through our work, the impossible work of mourning, we touch what is already gone. We carry it. Whatever desire we encounter, in us, in the text, between the various intervening bodies, is imbued with this impossible work of mourning. It determines our ability to reach. And what we reach toward is not death itself, but its echo. In the unforgivable, as in the untranslatable, there is an absence to contend with. Our own anticipated absence, and the absence of the other.

Untranslatability is precisely translation’s aporia. Our translational struggle (at the edge of what river? by whose hand bruised? and in what name?) locates itself, failingly, within untranslatability – within the untouchable unspeakable reserve of desire coiled in the belly of our texts, in the place where, imperfectly, they come to touch one another; the lines that we cross, the gulf that swallows us. And it is here, in this gulf, this abyss, here, which I called to begin with “the failure of translation”, from here this failure that desire emerges, only here that desire can emerge, if at all.

Loss in desire. Desire from loss. Desire because of loss.

Suffused with the sorrow, our outpouring and our arrestation, that saturates our work, when we touch the thing into which we fall, when we attempt to carry what we fail, what falls into us, through us, and away. What, of its remains, we betray. Desire is the expression of loss’s desire to salvage itself. And it is in that place that we move. We begin inside loss and we remain there. We begin inside the body and we remain there. There : we “receive a body” and we “leave [our] signature on it”. There : inside loss, which enables us, not to desire what is lost, but to desire loss. To feel loss in desire. Without which, we are unable to touch, with our bodies, the cry that persists in our mouths, that resists language's bind, freeing itself into the undecidable place where desire anticipates our translated remains.

Nathalie Stephens

Chicago, August 2006